Charity as an Evil

Charity is Not Always Good

Kreia is a character in the Star Wars videogame Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords. This post is not about that game, but the character of Kreia often inspires me to ponder on philosophical questions, especially ones that are of the moral nature, even though I'm not super big on philosophy in general.

Kreia is an unusual character in a Star Wars related media, which typically portrays characters as good or evil, light or dark, with very little in between. There's not a lot of room for ambiguity in Star Wars.

Kreia is a user of the Force, which in theory makes her a Jedi, yet she hates the Force and wishes to set people free from it. She's not good or evil, she's something of a pragmatist. She also despises the the shallow, cut and dry good and evil separation that the Jedi Order propagates to its people, seeing such a simple division as childish.

In the game, the character can choose whether or not he or she follows the light path or the dark path; the game brings forth several puzzles and dialogue choices where the player can choose how to act, and depending on his or her actions, the game will grant light side or dark side points. This was introduces in the first Knights of the Old Republic game, but it is much more interesting in KOTOR 2, since Kreia is there to accompany the player, and can often bring to question the "obviously good" choices that the player makes.

One of such instances is when a poor man asks the player for a few spare dollars.

The player can choose to give the man a few credits out of the goodness of his heart, and the game tricks you into thinking that you've now done a good deed, but Kreia is not as convinced.

She responds with the following:

Why did you do such a thing? Such kindnesses will mean nothing, his path is set. Giving him what he has not earned is like pouring sand into his hands.

To which the player can respond:

It may help him - if nothing else but to survive.

To which Kreia responds:

And would that be a kindness? What if by surviving another day, he brings a greater darkness upon another?
Even an act of kindness can may have more severe repercussions than you know, or can see.
By giving him something he has not earned, perhaps all you have helped him become is a target. Seeing another elevated often brings the eyes of others who suffer. And perhaps in the end all you've have wrought is more pain.
And that is my lesson to you: be careful of charity and kindness, lest you do more harm with open hands than a clenched fist.

I don't think all charity is bad. But I also don't think that labeling everything that does under the umbrella term "charity" is good, either. And indeed: sometimes charity can even be an act of evil, even with the best intentions.

But we all know what they say about best intentions.

My Experience with My Friend

Some years back, a friend of mine was broke. He had bad dealings with drugs, he owed the bank a ton of money for his house, lost his job, you know, all the good stuff.

He was also terrible with money in general. I don't know what it was about him, but he just absolutely could not handle it. He's not a stupid person, he's quite smart actually, but there was something about his ability to control his impulses and keep his life straight that he lacked in.

I myself have a reputation as someone who's rather prudent with his money, so I usually have a fairly healthy amount of it. This is just another way of saying that I don't have a social life, so I have nothing to spend my money on.

But I digress.

So, since we're friends, he asked for money. And I was reluctant. Not that I didn't want to help, but he had his tendency of burning his money on booze and whatnot the moment he got his hands on it, so I was scared to give him any, and rather certain that I was never going to get any of it back.

However, he did have no money, no money coming in and an empty fridge, so I wanted to do something.

He had been on a job interview and had managed to get a job about an hour from the town we live in, but of course he lacked the funds to pay for his travel. Yeah, he was a fuck up, and I can say this, since he now says it, too, and is open about it. Otherwise I wouldn't write about him.

I was doing well in my life financially, so I told him that I would buy a train ticket for him that would allow him to travel to work up until his first paycheck, and I would take him to the store to buy food for him, but I would not give him money.

I also told him that if he accepts the train ticket from me, and decides to not show up at work one day then I will be really fucking disappointed, and I would never help him out with anything, ever.

He agreed to the terms, and he did start to get his life together. We went food shopping together a few times a week for a month so that he would survive until the payday, and that was, I think, four years ago now, and he still works there and was actually recently promoted to a better position.

Also, the same guy who was totally awful with his money actually saved money, and bought my a blazer as a birthday present that was worth a few hundred bucks, because he knows I wear them at work. That's something I hold very dear to me.

The Moral of the Story?

Knowing him the way I do, I'm sure that if I had just given him a hundred bucks, two hundred bucks, whatever, he probably would not have made responsible choices with them.

That would have been the easy solution for me. Because even though things ended up well here, I still took a chance by being strict, and also put myself in a socially awkward position by giving him a big you need to grow up speech.

It's the easiest high in the world to just give people money when they ask. You get to be well liked and popular, and you get a warm feeling in your heart that tells you you've done a good thing, and everything is awesome, you're awesome.

But it's not always the responsible choice.

Responsibility is, though, is not often a thing people consider when partaking in charities. It's important to remember that people usually don't give their money away because of the other person, they do it for themselves; they do it to feel good, they do it to purchase a good conscience.

Nothing inherently wrong with that, mind you, but this is where responsibility comes in. We understand the need for being responsible in other choices we make, so why not charity.

Without responsibility, throwing money away to charities is nothing more than irresponsible hedonism, which is usually frowned upon, and should be.

So, I'm not against helping, of course not, but when you want to help, it's good to make sure that what you're doing actually does help. Think of the long term repercussions of your actions:

When you subsidize something, you get more of it.

If you reward an alcoholic for spending all his money on alcohol, you subsidize his destructive behavior, and therefore likely get more of it.

This is not a way to help a friend.

To truly help a friend, you sometimes need to give him or her tough love and make the person live with the choises made. Sometimes, there is no other way to make a person truly learn.

Just like when a government spends tax money to bail out a failed business, it is getting more of that failed business. In the long run, it's not good for anybody. In the short term, it helps out, but the longer it's being subsidized, the longer it takes for the business owner(s) to learn that the business practices are a failure.

We humans are not particularly good at changing on our own, we usually a need a reason for it.

And sometimes that reason is things simply going haywire.

In Conclusion

I offered to help out my friend, and in the end it ended up helping him. That's a really good thing. But notice how I low key set a price tag on my charity: I told him to keep going to work every day until the paycheck.

I made him do something for me, even though ultimately he was helping himself by doing it for me.

We react to incentives. I think giving a person an incentive to help himself out is far better than just subsidizing harmful behavior. The difference is subtle, but it's there and it's important.

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